Buddy Roemer comes up short in Americans Elect online vote

This was to have been the week that the founders of Americans Elect hoped a nation, disheartened by a long and unpleasant primary election season and dissatisfied with what the two parties are offering for president, would turn its longing eyes toward their new and intriguing Internet nominating process to choose an independent presidential candidate whom they would put on all 50 state ballots.

Tuesday was to have been the first of three online caucus days to winnow the field of candidates, amid building drama, to a manageable number for a final online nominating convention in June.

Winnowing is no longer a worry for Americans Elect. The only drama now is whether it will field a candidate this fall at all, or whether its ongoing $12 million to $15 million effort to gain ballot access in every state will have been for naught.

Americans Elect has canceled Tuesday's round of Internet voting because no candidate has reached the threshold of 1,000 online "clicks of support" from each of 10 states. The top declared candidate, Buddy Roemer, is not yet within shouting distance of meeting the threshold for inclusion in the caucus voting.

"We're not even halfway there yet," the former Louisiana governor said late this week. After weeks of strenuous effort Roemer has about 4,500 clicks, and even they were not distributed in a manner that would get him to the requirement.

"As of now, no candidate has met the thresholds necessary to move into the primary process and compete in our convention," Khalil Byrd, AE's chief executive officer, said in a terse statement this week. "Therefore, and per the rules affirmed by thousands of AE Delegates, the first voting in the primary round will now be held on May 15th."

"May 15th would be the drop dead date," said Nick Troiano, who recently left his job as national campus director for Americans Elect to lead an effort to draft David Walker, former comptroller general of the United States and a member of AE's board of advisers, as its candidate.

Not only is the ides of May the date of what would now be the first caucus, it also is the deadline for reaching the threshold to participate in what would be the last caucus May 22.

For Americans Elect this poses an existential dilemma. As Troiano explains, without a candidate, AE will not be able to secure the ballot spot it would be able to claim not just this year but, under rules in most states, in 2014 and 2016 if it were able to field a candidate this year who secured at least 5 percent of the vote.

And yet, right now it is hard to see anyone qualifying in time.

Long road for Roemer

The usually ebullient Roemer, who switched his sights from a Republican Party contest, in which he never really got a hearing, to an independent pursuit of the Americans Elect nomination, sounded a bit wearied late this week. Even if he gets the AE nod, he said, he would then still have to be polling at least 15 percent of the vote come fall in order to be included in the presidential debates, the stage that would really make a third-party candidacy meaningful.

Americans Elect also allows for draft candidates, and Ron Paul, who is still engaged in the Republican primary campaign, was, as of the end of last week, closing in on 9,000 clicks, though still nowhere near 1,000 in each of 10 states.

That said, Paul wants no part of Americans Elect.

"Congressman Paul does not have any interest in a third-party candidacy," spokesman Gary Howard said.

But while Roemer is struggling to meet the 10,000 clicks, Anderson has to achieve a more arduous 50,000 threshold because, according to Americans Elect's rules, serving as mayor of Salt Lake City doesn't make him as likely to be qualified to be president as Roemer, who has served as both a governor and member of Congress.

"I never really expected we would meet that threshold," said Anderson, who is pursuing an independent candidacy as the standard-bearer of the newly formed Justice Party.

"But we knew that thousands of people would be going to the website, and as long as we were able to show good, strong support we anticipated that we would be able to get a lot of public attention, which we're not getting otherwise from the mainstream media."

Nonetheless, he noted the irony of AE's predicament.

"They're trying to make things more democratic, but what could be less democratic than the number one and two candidates not making it into the first round of balloting," he said. "When they set the rules they had certain anticipations that have now been frustrated, so they need to change the rules."

'The vital center'

Americans Elect's problems were seeded with its founding by billionaire Peter Ackerman, a former top lieutenant to junk-bond king Michael Milliken, and a few of his well-heeled friends. They chose in 2010 to change their IRS status from that of a political organization to that of a social welfare organization, which does not have to identify its donors.

That also meant its leadership ostensibly couldn't indicate any preference for any candidate or type of candidate, even though it has been plain to observers that the debt-and-deficit hawk centrism of someone like Walker is to their liking.

"It's true that Americans Elect doesn't show a preference for a candidate; it isn't able to under law, but he does align well with where Americans who feel betrayed by both parties would like a candidate to be," said Troiano, acknowledging that a candidate of "the vital center" like Walker is "the kind of candidate Americans Elect in theory was built to give a platform for."

But so far the effort to draft Walker has drawn fewer than 500 clicks.

"They have made it very clear that they have a certain kind of centrist in mind, that they don't' want who they consider extremist or people who are divisive," said Anderson, a candidate of what he might describe as the "vital left."

Roemer a perfect fit?

Is Roemer the kind of candidate the folks behind Americans Elect would be OK with?

It hard to say. He's not the kind of big reputation-deep pockets candidate like New York City Michael Bloomberg that they might have pined for. He is more centrist than Rocky Anderson. But, like Anderson, Roemer has made the corrupting power of money on politics the central focus of his campaign, and he has criticized Americans Elect for keeping its donors secrets.

But, displaying some of his former bravado, Roemer said if he gets the Americans Elect nomination, the first thing he would do is raise enough money to pay AE back all it spent so he would, as a candidate for president, be unencumbered by any debt to its unseen funders.